Review: Old-School Blaster Master Overdrive Is Blast From the Past

Blaster Master Overdrive is the latest in a line of downloadable revivals of classic games that tweak the originals' formula with upgraded gameplay.

Like fellow WiiWare games Contra ReBirth and Adventure Island: The Beginning, the new Blaster Master Overdrive, released Monday for WiiWare, isn't a port of a classic game with a new coat of paint, but a "reimagining."

Blaster Master, originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, was praised for its seamless integration of both side-scrolling platforming gameplay (in a tank that could jump!) and top-down shooting action, plus its excellent music and graphics. While Overdrive isn't the first attempt at reviving the series, it is the best, and the most faithful to the original.

Just as in the classic, you control an extremely mobile tank called Sophia through a series of open-ended, 2-D, monster-filled caves. Your girl is mounted with a laser gun to start off, and you find new tools like a grappling hook and a drill as you explore the environment. It's a Metroid-style gameplay system in which you gain new abilities, which let you backtrack and reach places that were previously inaccessible, gaining rewards like health upgrades for your thoroughness.

The original Blaster Master was much more linear. Overdrive adds many more branching pathways and opportunities to explore, which is a welcome change. To help facilitate exploration, a mini-map automatically fills in when you enter a new room.

Japanese game developer Sunsoft makes exploration manageable thanks to the ever-useful map, and also rewards you for undertaking the task – and you will need those rewards. Blaster Master Overdrive is hard. It's also occasionally unfair. Several jumps, especially in the latter half of the game, are almost impossible to make without getting hit by an enemy. That’s why you must thoroughly explore when you get a new ability, so you can go back and get upgrades. By the time you get to the second half of the game, where the difficulty starts to ramp up, you will likely have enough upgrades to make things manageable.

Occasionally, you will get the chance to hop out of your tank and guide tank driver Alex through smaller caves, where the game transforms into a top-down shooter. These little caves were present in the original game, but in Overdrive they are vastly improved. For one, these areas aren’t as confined as they originally were, giving you much more room to navigate and making it easier to line up shots. You also no longer need to negotiate impossibly thin corridors filled with spikes.

You can strafe enemies by holding the Wiimote's B trigger with your index finger. But holding this button down often, which you'll want to do, can cause your finger to cramp. Not only is there no way to reconfigure the controls, the game doesn't support the Classic Controller, either.

In each level, one of these caves holds a boss monster. The bosses are suitably large and imposing, but for the most part they follow a simple pattern and rarely stray from it, usually only adding an extra attack or two when they get close to dying. That isn’t to say you won’t die – you certainly will if you’re not prepared. But the hardest part comes from learning the bosses' patterns, another throwback to games of Blaster Master’s era.

Overdrive takes almost all the parts that made Blaster Master good and improves on them, but the graphics prove to be a low point. The visuals are incredibly blurry, thanks in part to the game's lack of progressive scan. The first few environments are also painfully similar to each other, with the only discernible differences being their color palettes and background music. The later areas are more graphically varied.

The music, on the other hand, is great, consisting of remixes of classic Blaster Master tracks.

The best thing I can say about Overdrive is that it feels just like Blaster Master, with a few great new improvements and a few small new flaws.

WIRED Faithful to the original. Far less linear. Great music.

TIRED Blurry, ugly graphics. Iffy button configuration. Can be unfair in its difficulty.